> Please get in touch with the developers of the other free/open chess > application (Scid, ChessX, etc.) to make this new format as much supported > as possible (this the way to become a standard)
I've planned to write the patches for Scid and Scid vs PC for the support of this format, I'm knowing Scid very good. The developer of ChessX seems to be quite open for open standards, so I'm optimistic that he might support this format. But at first C/CIF has to reach a final version. > Sure, doing it with chessbase would be great, but I think it's not easy at > all. Merry Christmas ChessBase seems not to be interested in open standards, so I'm not optimistic to receive any response from ChessBase. But I see a better chance if many important applications like Scid, Scid vsPC, ChessX, Scidb, and more, are supporting the format. In fact I don't have a feedback from other projects yet. > Question: what is the role of the scidb file format, with the introduction > of cif? Which one is faster inside Scidb (.sci or cif) ? .sci is a binary format which contains data for position search acceleration, and .sci is quite more compact than .ccif, so .sci is the faster format. .cif/.ccif is defined for data interchange, and it's the appropriate format to write intermediate files. For example: if the user is closing the application, at next start of Scidb all the modified games will be restored; .cif will be used to store the modified data for the next start of Scidb. The current version of Scidb is using an enhanced PGN format for the intermediate file, but this isn't satisfactory. Consider that in future versions also binary data will belong to a chess game. So Scidb will use this format anyway, independent from the question whether it will become a standard or not. But C/CIF is the result of eight years development of a chess database, and C/CIF will be open source, so it might become a standard. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- By the way: If interested watch the discussion on <http://talkchess.com/forum/viewtopic.php?topic_view=threads&p=601507&t=54728>, I'm writing a lot about the decision why XML is used, and why the choice of XML is secondary in view of data interchange.
